‘History of the Arabs’

It took Professor Philip Khuri Hitti (Princeton University) ten years to write this historical masterpiece – History of the Arabs – which was first published in 1937. Dr. Hitti, a Maronite Christian, was born in Shimlan (Ottoman Syria, now part of Lebanon) in 1886. He died in 1978.

In his book, Dr. Hitti exposes many Zionists’ so-called “Biblical and historical” myths about Israelites being the earliest inhabitants of the land known as Philistines or Palestine in history for the last 5000 years. For example, in 1961, two Evangelist scholars, John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris in their book The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications – challenged Christians to stop trying harmonizations and start reconstructing the historical science including historical geology. Holy Qur’an does mention that prophet Moses (as) lead Israelites out of Egypt; receiving the Ten Commandments and Israelites worshipping Golden Calf – but it doesn’t agree with the rest of Biblical narration of Banu Israel conquering Palestine and displacing it native inhabitants (Phoenicians and Philistines) in the name of God.

If one believe Zionazi narrative that the Jews were in Palestine before the Arabs – then the question is: who was there before the Jews? The Canaanites, of course – But who represents them? In the first years of the last century Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who was to become the second president of Zionist entity – researched and found that the population of Palestine has not really changed from the earliest times. The Canaanites mixed with the Israelites, and converted to Judaism, and under Byzantine empire, most of them adopted Christianity. In 636 CE when the Jerusalem fell to Muslim army without a fight – they gradually became Arabs.

Zionist doctrine was the result of Jewish disillusionment with the future of European Jewry. That’s why most of Zionist writers hated Jewish submission to the Church and the European Christian majority. They called the fellow Jews as “savages”, “unclean”, “parasite”, “uncivlized”, “dogs”, “wanderers with no country to call theirs”, etc. Later, they used some of the same terminology to demonize the Palestinian natives. For example, Ben-Yahuda’s cooked-up story entitled “The Farm of the Sons of Reikhav”, which revolves around a Jews’ search for the ten Jewish tribes among the desert Arabs: “We are among our ancient brethren for whose descendants I have been searching for some time. Those ‘savage brothers’ of us preserved our land for two thousand years…” The so-called “common descent” was considered a ‘good catch’ in the early stages of the Zionist Project – which fooled many greedy Arab elites who dreamed to benefit from Jewish domination of European banking, trade, and political institutions.

Yitzhak Ben Zvi, during his 1937 visit to the Arab town of Nazareth – was impressed by the beauty of the town from a distance, but when he came closer he noted that “its street are narrow and dirty, filled with mire and garbage, like all Arab towns. And the dust-filled air is even worse than the filth”.

Israeli journalist and former member of Knesset, Uri Avnery, wrote: “The old Canaanite village became Israelite, passed through all the stages and in the end, became Arab. Nowadays it is Palestinian, unless it was wiped out in 1948 and replaced by an Israeli settlement. Throughout, the population did not really change. Many of the place names did not change either. Every new conqueror brought with him a new set of beliefs and a new elite, but the population itself did not change much. No conqueror was interested in driving out the inhabitants, who provided him with food and revenue…. It was only the Zionist conquest that, for the first time in history, radically changed the composition of the population….”

Dr. Hitti told John Richard Starkey in the interview linked above: “Remember that Islam, Christianity and Judaism are closely related historically, ideologically and theologically. Remember that the Muslims are heirs to the Hellenic philosophical traditions of Aristotle and Plato, and to a certain extent they are heirs to Roman law and culture. Islam and its rivals should be able to play a constructive, cooperative role, if they will keep in mind their common heritage. Of all the peoples in the world, Muslims are closest to Christians and Jews.”